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Securing the Bomb 2007
Slide Show
Moscow Building with Enough Material for a Bomb
This photograph shows a building at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow where enough HEU for a bomb was located, as it looked in 1994. There is a fence in the picture, though it was so overgrown with weeds it's difficult to see. When the Soviet Union collapsed, much of its nuclear security system — based on a closed society, closed borders, KGB surveillance, and nuclear workers who got the best Soviet society had to offer — collapsed with it. Fortunately, in Russia, during the 16 years since the Soviet collapse, the most egregious security weaknesses — gaping holes in fences, no security cameras in areas where nuclear material was stored, and no detectors at the door to set off an alarm if some one was carrying out plutonium or HEU — have largely been fixed. This building and the facility where it is located have received extensive U.S.-funded security upgrades, with modern fences, intrusion detectors, nuclear material vaults, radiation monitors to detect any unauthorized removal, and more. But inadequate security for potential nuclear bomb materials remains a global problem; the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons exist in more than forty countries, with security against theft ranging from excellent to appalling, and no binding global nuclear security standards in place. A global campaign to secure the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons and potential nuclear bomb materials to stringent standards is urgently needed.
For more, see Chapter 1 of Securing the Bomb 2007, or "The Threat in Russia and the Newly Independent States of the Former Soviet Union" and "The Global Threat".
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.